Emergency preparedness in the workplace

What will happen if a fire breaks out in your building? What happens if a natural disaster suddenly happens at your office? Do you have emergency preparedness plan in place so your staff knows what to expect and knows what to do? Emergency preparedness is one of the best ways to ensure panic and chaos do not happen and to prevent accidents and deaths from happening.

An effective emergency preparedness plan will start with proper planning. Your management team needs to sit down with local emergency responders to talk about the proper procedures of emergency preparedness and to determine the escape routes and safety exits for the company. Planning is vital to emergency preparedness as you not only find out what emergencies can occur but what supplies you need to always have on hand in order to keep your staff safe. Employee safety is one of the biggest jobs the management has. You must make sure that you are looking over safety protocols and that you are updating them regularly in order to protect your employees. Not only do you need updates to them, you must make time to meet with your employees and to go over the safety procedures like emergency exit plans and so forth. Just like every time you get on an airplane and you are given the safety instructions, you need to do the same thing with your employees at least 1-2 times a year to be sure they know what to do.According to OSHA, an emergency preparedness plan must include the following:

• Emergency escape procedures and proper escape routes.


• Assignments delegated to members of the staff that are in charge of getting their floor to safety and to be in charge of turning off things such as gas lines to prevent a large problem from occurring.


• Procedures must be in place to ensure each floor of the building is clear and each employee is accounted for.


• Certain staff members must be trained in medical and rescue procedures like CPR and must be able to perform them in an emergency situation.


• Assignments delegated to employees to report the different things that have occurred such as a fire breaking out in the office.

A good emergency preparedness plan will have a plan in mind for every possible situation. This includes anything from shootings to tornados even if you may feel that your company may never encounter these things, you still need to be prepared for them because you never know.

The chain of command is one of the things that you really need to pay attention to. This is basically the procedure of how things are taken care of when the building is being exited. By training certain employees to stay behind and to be in charge of various things, it will eliminate confusion and it will also help to cut down on confusion, which can easily arise as panic will set in to an extent.

Emergency plans also need to account for things that are out of the ordinary like when the phones are out and you cannot get in touch with emergency responders. There needs to be a secondary protocol that states how you can get in touch with the police, fire, and medical emergency units. Amateur radio systems are one of the best ways to have a backup system in place if you do not have phones.

Establish the procedure of reporting and recording the employees that come out of the building. Management needs to ensure that they have the names of everyone that has come out of the building and is accounted for.